Friday, March 30, 2012

Correr Museum: Gustav Klimt
in the Sign of Hoffmann and the Secession exhibition.A century
after his acclaimed participation in the Venice Biennale (1910), Gustav Klimt
returns to the lagoon as the protagonist of a remarkable exhibition in the
rooms of the Correr Museum, until July 8. It is the perfect occasion to
celebrate the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth (1862-2012). Gustav Klimt
in the Sign of Hoffmann and the Secession was curated by Alfred Weidinger and features
an exceptional series of paintings, rare and precious drawings, furniture and
elegant jewelry, but also elaborate reconstructions and interesting historical
documents. The aim is to introduce the visitor to the genesis and evolution, in
both architecture and painting, of Klimt’s work and that of the other
protagonists of the Viennese Secession. The movement was one of the highest
peaks in European Modernism and counted among its key players such artists as
George Minne, Jan Toorop, Fernand Khnopff, Koloman Moser, and above all Klimt’s
companion on many intellectual ventures and projects, Josef Hoffmann.

Above:Gustav Klimt: Salome (Judith II), 1909 – oil on
canvas.

Gustav Klimt
in the Sign of Hoffmann and the Secession exhibition. Probably the focal point of the exhibition Gustav
Klimt’s spectacular Beethoven Frieze triptych, 1901-02.

Gustav Klimt
in the Sign of Hoffmann and the Secession exhibition. GustavKlimt: Portrait of Marie Henneberg, 1901-02 - oil on canvas.

Gustav Klimt
in the Sign of Hoffmann and the Secession exhibition. Josef Hoffmann: table and a pair of chairs from the boudoir of Hermine Gallia (whose portrait, by Gustav Klimt is in the background) c. 1912n- lacquered and gilded wood, brass, other material.

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Palazzo Pisani Moretta: benefit for a Healing Garden at the San Camillo Hospital. The
dinner to collect funds for the Healing Garden project (Un
Giardino Per Rivivere) at the San Camillo Hospital on the
Lido, was held at Palazzo Pisani Moretta and was graciously
sponsored by the owners of the palazzo and by the Calieron Confraternity.
A garden for the senses, the Healing Garden is a natural place for
mental and physical stimulation, and as such, is designed to provide maximum
possible sensory richness. The sight is the sense that dominates most of the
sensory experiences, but sometimes, you simply close your eyes and are
receptive to noticing that other senses provide other rich connections.
Chromatherapy and aromatherapy are now two very useful and strategic approaches
to build and order sensory stress therapeutic purposes, but also
"hearing" and "feel" can play a very important role in the
natural area of the garden.

Contribute: You too can contribute to realize the Healing
Garden, log onto the website of Un Giardino Per Rivivere
and go to: Come Aiutarci.

Palazzo Pisani Moretta: benefit for a Healing Garden at the San Camillo Hospital.
Garden
designer, Benedetta Piccolomini, landscape architect, Paolo Sgaravatti and
neurologist, Francesca Meneghello are the people responsible for the Healing
Garden project.

photograph and copyright Manfredi Bellati

Palazzo Pisani Moretta: benefit for a Healing Garden at the San Camillo Hospital. In the spectacular
candle lit salone on the piano nobile of Palazzo Pisani Moretta a long table
was set up with gourmet food prepared by the Calieron Confraternity.

photograph and copyright Manfredi Bellati

Palazzo Pisani Moretta: Calieron Confraternity.
Some of the eighteen members of the Confraternita’ del Calieron or Calieron Confraternity,
which was founded in 1994 by a group of gentlemen who love good food and drink.
The gentlemen cooks are professional architects, doctors, notaries, financiers,
industrialists, landowners and insurance brokers, two of them also act as
sommeliers. They take pleasure in
gastronomy and when business permits they organize and cook lunches and dinners
for friends in and around Italy, as well as abroad. Their headquarters is at
the Villa Marcello between Padua and Treviso.
Caileron in Veneto dialect is the big copper pot you cook polenta in and
Calieron is also a trophy, which is “up for grabs” each year among the
confraternity in the challenge between the stoves. The winner, chosen by a jury formed by the
wives and invited guests, is elected president for a year.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Venice:
Restaurant de Venise – Judi Harvest - Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venice exhibition.Judi Harvest’s Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venice is a "...series, an
evolution of the themes of my work: the fragility of life and the search for
beauty. It continues to examine how did we get here, where are we going and why
are we here. This collage series, like my other large works in Venice that
proceeded it, is a happy marriage of the ancient techniques of Venice and
contemporary forms and media.” Judi explains.

.Men Are
From Mars, Women Are From Venice.Judi Harvest receives collectors, friends and
press in the bar area of the Bistrot de Venise where her exhibition is hung, until April 5th.

Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venice. On a
background of a Tiepolo ceiling astronauts, spaceships and planets are collaged. “Venice has
more full moons than anywhere else on the planet. Satellites, aliens and a Venetian restaurant
have more in common than meets the eye. As with all great works of art and
relationships, they are concerned with communication, long before cell phones
and email, news spread quickly and elegantly over food and drinks in Venice.”
And more on Venice, “Of course gondolas are not rockets and vaporettos are not rovers, but the canals move and people communicate and work with their hands.
Martians have come here to observe one of the last places on earth where meaningful
conversations still happen at the table, where beauty is celebrated and
computers have not replaced the artist’s hands.” Judi concludes.

Bistrot
de Venise. “Before there
were art galleries in Venice, artists were invited to exhibit their work in
restaurants. In fact, the Venice Biennale was created over coffee and drinks at
the Caffe Florian. This exhibition keeps that tradition alive.In this age of wireless relationships, it is important to remember and
frequent the places where food, wine and conversations became and still are, an
art form.”

Above. One of the rooms of the Bistrot de Venise. The restaurant first
opened in 1993 and has since become a hangout and meeting place where the
figurative arts, poetry and culture combine, simply, with food and wine.

Bistrot de
Venise. From Portoguaro, chef Mario Missese has been cooking in Venice since
the 1980’s his food is “tasty and colorful” and is a modern reinterpretations of historical
Venetian cuisine.

Will Mattia grow up to be an architect or designer like his father, mother and grandfather above?

Men Are
From Mars, Women Are From Venice.Judi Harvest draws in the visitor’s book, she
is siting between art events organizer, Mario Di Martino and to her left, the
curator of her exhibition, Emanuele Horodniceanu.

Men Are
From Mars, Women Are From Venice. The drawing in the pages of the restaurant’s
visitors book depicts the people at the table, Judi used all the ingredients on
hand; lipstick, candle wax, red wine, friends, food, art, Martians, satellites,
stars, chocolate and coffee….to create it.

Bistrot de
Venise. One of the many deserts. The caramelized
sugar topping on this delicious trio is inspired by Murano glass, it sits on top
of a chocolate and coconut glace, in the middle are crumbled marron glaces and
in the foreground, a mandarin and coffee sorbet a on a crumble base.

Monday, March 26, 2012

Palazzo
Fortuny: Restoration of the Mariano Fortuny’s Bayreuth Theatre model. Donations
are open, buy a virtual seat for yourself and your friends and contribute to
the restoration of the Mariano Fortuny’s Bayreuth Theatre model, which urgently
needs your help. Seating according to color are inspired by certain
Wagnerian works that Mariano Fortuny depicted in paintings and
etchings: YELLOW:Flower Maidens(E 200 $ 280) running after each other and playing in Parsifal:
RED: Wotan(E 100
$140), the King of the Gods found in the tetralogy The Ring of the
Nibelung; BLUE: Sieglinde(E 50 $ 70), Sigmund’s sister in The Valkyrie and
finally PURPLE:Mime(E 25 $ 35), a character present both in The Rhine
Gold and Siegfried. For more information contact The Venice Foundation.

Palazzo
Fortuny: Restoration of the Mariano Fortuny’s Bayreuth Theatre model. Since
1891 Mariano Fortuny was completely captivated by the allure of the
staging of Wagner’s theatre, however many years passed before he
concretely measured himself against the theatre experimenting at length with
both lighting and technology and the preparation of scenographic
sketches. It was in fact starting with the realization of scenographies
linked to the works of Wagner that this model was born in 1903. Made of
wood and metal and now kept in the atelier, it is a reconstruction of
the layout and the risers of the setting of the German Bayreuth Theatre. This model is an intricate and complex
system made up of small cables, electrical power transformers and light bulbs;
of wings and scenes depicted on cardboard.

Palazzo
Fortuny: Restoration of the Mariano Fortuny’s Bayreuth Theatre model. Just to
give you an idea of the sorry state the model is in.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Spring at
Palazzo Fortuny: Avere Una Bella Cera, Wax Figures in Venice and in Italy. The
world’s first exhibition on wax portraits is on at Palazzo Fortuny, Avere Una
Bella Cera, Wax Figures in Venice and in Italy, until June 25. It analyses a field that has been studied very
little by art historians: that of life-size wax figures. The project was inspired by two fortunate
coincidences, the existence of a series of life- size wax portraits in Venice’s
public collections and churches, and the centenary of the publication of the
“History of Portraiture in Wax”, written by the famous Viennese art historian
Julius von Schlosser and the first work devoted to the history of wax
portraits. A superb Italian translation of Schlosser’s work by Andrea Daninos,
curator of the Venice exhibition, has recently been published, complete with an
extensive and detailed critical commentary.

Palazzo
Fortuny: Avere Una Bella Cera. The Venetian exhibition is the outcome of more
than three years of research and, for the first time, it brings together nearly
all of the extant sculptures in Italy, most of which unpublished or never
displayed before . The rooms of Palazzo Fortuny, considered a major
attraction for art lovers visiting Venice, are beautifully transformed with an
exhibition project by Daniela Ferretti, into a veritable wax museum,
re-creating the fascinating atmosphere that always surrounds such displays.

Above:Andrea Daninos curator of the exhibition and Daniela Ferretti who conceived the
exhibition project.

Palazzo Fortuny:
Avere Una Bella Cera. The exhibition has several sculptures by two artists who
worked outside Italy, anticipating Madame Tussaud’s famous museum. This section
present the portrait of Marie Caroline de Bourbon-Sicile by Joseph Müller-Deym,
a mysterious Austrian nobleman who owned a famous wax museum in Vienna in the
18th century, and the works that the Piedmontese Francesco Orso, who opened a
similar wax exhibition in Paris during the period of the French Revolution,
made for the Savoyard court: the busts of Victoria of Savoy-Soissons (above top
c.1780-85), Victor Amadeus III of Savoy and Maria Antonia Ferdinanda de Bourbon
(above bottom c. 1780-85).

Palazzo
Fortuny: Avere Una Bella Cera. The exhibition itinerary continues with the
faces of saints and criminals, two recurrent subjects in the ceroplastic
tradition. The former are represented by twelve busts of Franciscans (above),
made of wax and with glass eyes and real hair; datable to the 18th century,
they are unique in religious iconography made of wax. They will be juxtaposed
with a series of twelve wax portraits of criminals modeled in the late 19th
century by Lorenzo Tenchini, a pupil of Cesare Lombroso. Three wax busts, the
only Italian examples of anthropological portraits, will be displayed alongside
them. Depicting a Caucasian, an Ethiopian (above c. 1867) and a Bedouin, they
were made by Remigio Lei, a wax model maker from Modena, in the second half of
the 19th century for the ethnographic-anthropological collection of the local
anatomical museum.

photographs and copyright by Manfredi Bellati

Palazzo
Fortuny: Avere Una Bella Cera. The main section of the exhibition is devoted to
wax portraiture in Italy, is introduced by two life-size figures of
18th-century Venetian children in period costumes (above c. 1790-95). The two
works, cited by Schlosser and Mario Praz (the latter compared them to the
leading figures in Henry James’s novel The Turn of the Screw), have long been
in the storerooms of the Palazzo Mocenigo and have not been displayed publicly
for decades. Their unrivalled craftsmanship and disturbing realism will
unquestionably astonish visitors.

photograph courtesy Palazzo Fortuny

Palazzo
Fortuny: Avere Una Bella Cera. The Bologna School, in which the art of
life-size wax portraiture was extremely popular, will be represented by a
series of works by Luigi Dardani, Filippo Scandellari and Angelo Gabriello Piò.

Monday, March 19, 2012

Diana Vreeland and Andy Warhol in Piazza San Marco in Venice, Summer 1973. from the book by Eleanor Dwight, Diana Vreeland, New York, Harper Collins, 2002.

“Nothing is more marvelous than
sitting at a little table in the gathering of dusk in the Piazza san Marco, the
guest of six golden-bronze horses prancing away to paradise”. DV*

Palazzo Fortuny: Diana Vreelend After Diana Vreeland exhibition.At Palazzo Fortuny, until June 25, Diana Vreeland After Diana Vreeland exhibition curated by Maria Luisa Frisa and Judith Clark, was commissioned by Lisa Immordino Vreeland and coordinated by Daniela Ferretti.It is the first major exhibition to be dedicated to the extraordinary and complex Diana Vreeland (Paris 1903- New York 1989). It explores the many sides of her work and seeks to offer a fresh approach with which to interpret the elements of her style and thinking. The aim being to restore the sense of the "magnificent gait" with which the "High Priestess of Fashion", as she was also known, processed through fashion of the twentieth century, initially during her years at Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, and then in her role as Special Consultant for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.Note: all DV Diana Vreeland quotes are taken from the catalogue Diana Vreeland After Diana Vreeland by Judith Clark and Maria Luisa Frisa and published by Marsilio.

DV. The cabinet for Black and White is indebted to her
double-page compositions and so the vertical structure of the cabinet uses a
different set of rules: the cabinet frame becomes graphic lines across a page.
The cabinet with its reference to fashion spreads disrupts the museum cabinet
just as she disrupted the rules of museum practice with the rules of fashion.

“I don’t think anybody has been in a better place at a better time than I
was when I was editor of Vogue. Vogue
always did stand for people’s lives. I
mean, a new dress doesn’t get you anywhere: it’s the life you’re living in the
dress, and the sort of life you had lived before, and what you will do in it
later. Like all great times, the sixties
were about personalities. It was the
first time when mannequins became
personalities. It was a time of great
goals, an inventive time… and these
girls invented themselves. Naturally, as an editor I was there to help
them along.” DV.

photograph Francesco de Luca courtesy Fortuny Press office

"The Ballets Russes, which is the only avant-garde I’ve ever known..". DV

“Why don’t you? Have a room done up in every color
green? This will take months, years, to collect, but it will be delightful—a
melange of plants, green glass, green porcelains, and furniture covered in sad
greens, gay greens, clear, faded, and poison greens? And object across time
where color coded 18th century and her coining of the phrase Palazzo Pyjama and
her love of YSl are brought together because they are green, different greens.
She privileged qualities of the object that may not be privileged today—the
color over the 18th century?” DV.

DV.1909-1939 or The 10s, The 20s and The 30s. Couture
from those years was the subject of Vreeland’s exhibition but also represented
for her a quintessential glamor and luxury. Chanel, Fortuny, and Schiaparelli.
Her past and her preferences permeate all her exhibitions.

A cabinet with personal memorabilia and photographs, letters, books, sketches and above a row of DV's shoes.

What Becomes a Legend Most?An advertisment for Blackglama mink.

architects Joffrey and Kate Weaver

DV. This tableau was one of the first that made a
connection between dress and the art world explicitly, not so much by
juxtaposing the dress with the Mondrian “original” on the wall, but by
exhibiting it flat, on the wall—by treating it as art. It is about
exhibition-making but she didn’t call it that. By hanging a dress flat you are
creating a different set of associations. Captions cannot do that work for us;
she knew this intuitively.

DV. Italy/Props. Diana Vreeland believed that all stories were dramatic.
Her exhibitions at the Met had at the entrance a pointof view, a vista, a prop! Usually a huge prop, here re-
created by a horse. It is surrounded by three mannequins
dressed in Pucci and Missoni, the Italian fashion houses
she championed in America and whose color and
glamour she so loved. The horse is no longer the 17th
century white horse that she used in her first show,The World of Balenciaga, but its Italian counterpart that
welcomes the visitor to Italy instead. Italy becomes our
focal point, our point of view.

Rosita Missoni stands between two of her designs.

Amerigo Restucci, rector Universita Iuav di Venezia behind him, armor, copy of an original from XVI century and a cape by Biki in red silk taffeta late 60's early 70s.

DV.Acclaimed fashion hair stylist Angelo Seminara (above) designed
wigs that link the worlds of fashion styling and of museum
staging, seeing “historic” wigs through contemporary eyes.
The 18th century wig created by Harold Koda when he
was an assistant to Vreeland is as iconic in its way as the
clothes she exhibited.

Beppe Modenese, Barbara Berlingieri and Piero Pinto

DV. Dalziel Curtains. “Why don’t you, if you have a dark-dining room in a
city apartment, stop trying to brighten it and paint in
dark grape red and drape the windows in festoons of
real Scotch tartan?” DV.

DV. Vreeland was proud of her Scottish ancestry.The Dalziels had not lived in Scotland for many
generations but she loves their family motto:“I dare.”She wrote in her teenage diary: “I am Diana, a goddess,
therefore ought to be wonderful, pure, marvelous, as
only I alone can make myself... no one can ever rob me
of that name, never shall I change it. Diana was a goddess and I must live up to that
name, Dalziel = I dare, therefore I dare, I dare
change to day, and make myself exactly
how I want to be.” DV.

DV. “September 16, 1968 – Re: SERPENTS – Don’t forget
the serpent… - The serpent should be on evey finger and all wrists and all
everywhere… - The serpent is the motif of the hours in jewelry… - We cannot see enough of the…” DV.

A gilded bronze and coral Cameo, once owned by Yves Saint Laurent is worn as a pendent by Cecilia Matteucci Lavarini.

Riccardo Priolisi, Tord Dyrssen and John Hooks

Jewelry designer and sculpture Giorgio Vigna

DV. Diana Vreeland adored uniforms “I love nineteenth century colors. I love the names of colors of men’s clothes of the Regency period—buff,
sand, fawn... and don’t forget snuff! My God, there
were words in those days. Balenciaga had the most wonderful sense of color—
his tete de negre, his café au lait, his violets, his
magentas, and his mauves. Every summer I’d take his
same four pairs of slacks and his same four pullovers
to Southampton with me. Then... one year I went
down to Biarritz. I laid out exactly the same four pairs of slacks, exactly the same four pullovers... and I’d never seen them before! It’s the light of course—the intensifying light of the Basque country. There’s never been such a light. That was Balenciaga’s country.” DV.

DV. From the pages of Vogue Mel Ferrer filming "The Brave Bulls" in Mexico.